10 ways to improve your content marketing stamina

Content marketing is more of a marathon than a sprint. Those who win stay in the game long enough to outlast—or out-create—everyone else ultimately achieves their goals. Just like training for an athletic event, there are certain habits you can build into your workflow to help you improve your content marketing stamina.

Consider these 10 suggestions ...

Pay attention to who is already influencing this space through traditional books, eBooks, blogs, social media, etc. If you can't rattle these off, you're already in trouble.

Talk to the people you want to reach. Ask questions and listen.

Find a place to keep different things you find online you think might be beneficial in the future. I collect different blog posts, research studies, e-newsletters, etc. I never know when I am going to need to refer back to that information.

Read what your competitors are producing. Don't do this to copy or critique what they are doing. Rather, use it as an opportunity to learn from someone else trying something. This is especially true if they are a competitor that you're losing to at the sales table.

Outline a number of sample headlines BEFORE you need them. Some will work; some won't. That doesn't matter.

Establish a team of people you can work with on a regular basis to ideate, create, and publish content. The more you work together, the more you will become familiar with the expectations of the rest of the team.

Stay close to objections being raised during your client's sales process. The client should be able to keep you in touch with these issues. Your content strategy should help you shorten the sales cycle and close more business.

Establish ongoing relationships with the people you write with and for when possible. The more you write about a particular industry or group of people, the more efficient you will become at creating the content.

Try producing different types of content. This will keep you interested and will provide a variety of styles to connect with your target audience.

Spend your time with people and in industries that are of natural interest to you. The best content developers are naturally curious about the things they write about. If you don't care about the subject matter, you're not going to bring the creativity or persuasiveness to the final product.

There isn't anything magical about the list above.

Everyone needs to find their own efficiencies as they pursue their content marketing efforts. The key is to keep moving forward. Eventually, you'll find yourself developing your habits and tactics to improve your content marketing stamina.

What would you add to the list?

Image Credit: Shutterstock

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